A Second Career at Craft Shows

Baby boomers are a very creative people.  But so often the demands of career and raising a family leaves little time for creativity in your middle age years.  But as more baby boomers complete their years of service in their careers and move toward retirement, they have plenty of energy and creativity left for a new passion in life, one that expresses all that creativity of their youth.

This is one reason we have seen such an explosion of craft fairs in the country which provide an outlet for all of that creative talent baby boomers are expressing through their arts and craft.  The great thing about crafts shows is you can start wherever you are in your creative arts and continue to grow and become more skilled each passing year.  To get started, you should take on this new hobby and small business with the same enthusiasm and passion you did when you were employed in your former career.  That is the great thing about baby boomers having this kind of free time in the retirement years.  There is so much talent and energy available that to not make it available to the public would be a crime.

It is going to take some preparation to get ready for your first craft fair.   The preparation will be on three fronts.  One is making contacts with the organizers of upcoming fairs and getting on the schedule to be able to display a booth there.  The easiest way to find out how to do that is attend the new craft fair that comes up in the area.  They are often associated with special events such as Oktoberfest or a food or music festival.  By attending several as you are in your preparation period, you can accomplish several good things…

• . You can look at booths of many different vendors to get ideas for your booth when you are ready to take the plunge.
• . You can talk to vendors who are selling there and learn about how to go about getting on the program for this fair and to learn about upcoming events you can participate in.  Don’t worry about you seeming to pose a threat as a future competition for sales.  There is a camaraderie among crafters and you will enjoy the social aspect of mixing with other creative people.
• . You can talk to the people who organize the show and get a feel for how you will fit in to their next event.

Another line of preparation is booth creation.  It’s good if you are starting early because it will take some time and a bit of expense to get the materials together and for you to build the skills to put the booth up, take it down, move it and store it between shows.   Again, your contacts with experienced craft show veterans will be invaluable for this.

Finally, but this is the most important part of your preparations is your talent and craft that you will be preparing to sell at the craft shows. You can purchase some examples of similar crafts you see doing well at the fairs you scout out.  These can be templates for what you want to do.  But you will impose your own creative vision on the craft so what you offer when you finally get to the craft faire will be uniquely yours and speak of your vision.

Along with these preparations, think about how you will customize your booth to draw customers in.  From craft fairs you have attended in the past and the ones you scout, you will witness that there are certain booths that draw crowds and others that just don’t seem to get the customers.  So you want to make your booth inviting to customers so you will reap a good return on your effort in the form of sales.

There are a variety of ways to draw customers.  From candles, to contests, to videos playing, to using music or live talent to making your craft as people watch, there are many ways you can experiment around with to draw customers.  You will get a unique thrill from the sales you make each day.  But more importantly, you will be expressing that creative side of you and getting that fulfillment that you had to wait to this phase of life to express.  And that’s a wonderful benefit of learning to sell your crafts at craft fairs.

An Aversion to War

If there ever was a baby boomer “issue” that has become engrained into the heart and psyche of a generation, it is an aversion to war due to the horrific experience if Vietnam.  While a relatively small percentage of surviving baby boomers actually went to and fought in Vietnam, the scar on the national psyche was so deep that it has influenced the way baby boomers have thought about war and how they selected their government representatives for over 30 years.

This is in stark contrast to the way the parents of the Baby Boom generation viewed warfare and the use of the country’s military might.  Because World War II was such a necessary conflict and winning it would be the difference between a world of freedom or domination by a cruel dictator, that fight had a nobility and a clear cut purpose to it.  So when we, as Americans, banded together to defeat Nazi Germany and her allies, it was an act of world changing sacrifice and nobility that shaped that generation.  To the parents of baby boomers, warfare in a noble cause was the highest calling of a nation and part of our national pride.

Everything about Vietnam was contrary to that vision.  The mission was unclear and the military was not empowered to win decisively as they were in World War II.  Some saw Vietnam as a puppet war in several respects.  In one way it was a puppet war because the real enemy in Vietnam was not the North Vietnamese but China and Russia were using that conflict, and the Vietcong as puppets to lure the American military into a no win situation and deplete our resources and our will to fight.

Others viewed Vietnam as a puppet conflict to benefit the American military and business interests who were profiting from the conflict.  While this is a cynical and harsh way to view a conflict, the distrust of the “military/industrial complex” was prevalent in the minds of a youthful baby boomer generation who saw their brothers and cousins go off to a brutal war which, in their minds, was being conducted to benefit business.  Small wonder that many came out of this era bitter and resentful of big business interests.  That distrust has surfaced many times over the years and it dominates discussions of modern conflicts America is involved with.

But there has been good come out of the national aversion to war that was the product of the Vietnam conflict.  The anti war movement did not result in the reduction in our commitment to a strong military and the America’s military continues to be the strongest on earth.  In fact, some of the ways the military has served the country in situations that were not warlike such as hurricane relief etc. has reinforced that the military as an institution is a necessary and honorable part of our society.

Moreover, the way wars since Vietnam have been conducted have shown, in many cases, that an intelligent approach to conflict will result in the wise use of our military.  The current problematic conflict tends to overshadow that since Vietnam, our presidents have used the military with skill and intelligence that reflects the insistence of the baby boom generation that we don’t just be the strongest military power, we also have to be the wisest.  The way small conflicts like the Balkans and the first Gulf War were conducted reflect a new strategy that avoids the tragic mistakes of Vietnam and uses our military to win decisively and quickly.

Each new conflict gives the baby boomer generation and indeed all generations before and after the chance to redefine what military superiority really means.  And whatever political viewpoint we might have, it can be said that if Vietnam caused the baby boomer generation to become more reflective and call upon political leadership to show accountability and responsibility in the use of our military might, that is a good outcome of what otherwise was a very bad war.